WordPress 5.9 released: Block themes and better lazy loading

The content management system WordPress has received a new update. WordPress 5.9 is now available for download and comes up with some exciting new features. The new features include, for example, so-called block themes, performance improvements and an optimized lazy loading.

WordPress 5.9: The most important innovations

The free content management system WordPress has received an update to version 5.9, which brings some exciting new features. WordPress 5.9 listens to the codename Joséphine and comes up, among other things, with a new, modernized default theme called Twenty Twenty-Two. It allows full site editing for the first time.

This is also available with the new Block Themes, which provide users with a wide range of visual options. The Block Themes provide a basic framework that can then be customized using the Gutenberg Editor blocks.  Colors, fonts, block designs, page templates and much more can henceforth be set directly in the site editor thanks to WordPress Block Themes and are immediately visible.

Since all elements of a WordPress site (including landing page, header and footer areas, and more) can now be customized instantly in the editor, the barrier to entry in WordPress 5.9 for newcomers is naturally higher than in the past.

New template blocks for dynamic content

The Twenty Twenty-Two theme also comes up with new template blocks for dynamic content. All areas of a WordPress site can be controlled and customized in WordPress 5.9 directly in the editor through templates. However, only when using the new block themes. Who continues to use the Classic-Edtior, the changes and innovations should not even notice.

Other new features include new typography tools, flexible layout controls, and more detailed control of details like spacing, margins, and more.

Performance optimization in lazy loading

Thanks to an improvement in lazy loading, WordPress 5.9 is also said to offer improved performance. With this technique, which has been used since version 5.5, the images and iFrames on your own page are loaded with a delay. And only when they really move into the area visible on the screen.

Since then, the implementation of Lazy Loading provided a massive performance improvement in the frontend of WordPress and could now be optimized even further. The default setting to load all images with a delay resulted in degraded performance on the LCP metric (Largest Contentful Paint). It refers to the render time of the largest image or text block visible in the viewport, relative to the first load of a page.

It is in this area that WordPress 5.9 noticeably improves, thanks to a fix. It prevents images above the visible area from loading with a delay. According to an internal test of the WordPress providers could thus be achieved in about 50 tested themes in a significant improvement in performance. In some cases, the loading times could be reduced by up to 30 percent as a result.

New blocks for the Gutenberg editor

The Gutenberg editor also receives an update with WordPress 5.9 and gets new blocks donated. In addition, you can expect some improvement to already available blocks. Especially interesting is the extension of the gallery block.

Here, single images within the gallery are now treated equally compared to single images, which allows a more individual design of galleries. In addition, images in a gallery can now behave differently and be displayed in a different style. Until now, settings in galleries applied to all images. All innovations of WordPress 5.9 you can also find again neatly on the corresponding news page of the provider.